The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist

by Franz De Waal

  The Catholic Church, on the other hand, saw the universe as vertically arranged between heaven and earth. From this perspective, it made sense to speak of "higher" and "lower" forms of life, with humans being closest to the deity. Via philosophy, this way of thinking permeated all of the social sciences and humanities, where it still lingers even though biology has made it absolutely clear that the idea of a linear progression among life forms is mistaken. Every organism fits on the phylogenetic tree without being above or below anything else. Biologists make distinctions between organisms that do well or are extinct, that are specialized or generalized, or that multiply slowly or rapidly, but they never look at one organism as a model that others strive for or that is inherently superior.

  These distinct strands of thought have made the West's relation with nature fundamentally schizophrenic: the dominant religion tells us that we are separate, yet science puts us squarely inside nature. This bears on the issue of anthropomorphism and explains why I attribute opposition to it to a desire to keep animals at arm's length rather than concerns about scientific objectivity. The latter is largely a rationalization by behaviorists.

  Of course, picking on behaviorists is nothing new for an ethologist such as myself. Given the historical background of the contrasting views of humans' relationships to animals, there is nothing more logical than that an approach to animal behavior coming out of biology should collide with one coming out of psychology.48 Behaviorists and ethologists have been at each other's throats ever since Daniel Lehrman wrote his stinging attack on Lorenz's instinct theory, in 1953. The ill feelings were mutual, and the stage seemed set for a disastrous split. That this didn't happen is due to both camps discovering in time that they shared a fascination with animals. Gerard Baerends, a Dutch ethologist, described his meeting with the enemy in Montreal, in 1954:

  Jan van lersel and I were the first ethologists to meet Danny Lehrman after his critique had appeared. After a few minutes of irrelevant behavior, we happened to discover that birdwatching was our common interest. This greatly facilitated our further exchange of ideas, which-as we soon found out-were far more compatible than earlier thought.49

  Since then, both ethology and behaviorism have been transformed from within and now go largely by different names. The most effective criticism of behaviorist positions was delivered in-house by psychologists who questioned the ladder-like Scala Naturae view of evolution and objected to reliance on the albino rat as the animal of choice. Behaviorism still exists, but the old type has been relegated to history as "radical."so

  The descendants of behaviorists call themselves comparative psychologists, a school that has grown considerably closer to ethology since Robert Hinde's grand synthesis, Animal Behavior, was published in 1966. The Journal of Comparative Psychology has become a meeting ground of students of animal behavior from backgrounds as diverse as traditional learning psychology, cognitive psychology, anthropology, behavioral ecology, and ethology. Thus, a recent handbook entitled Comparative Psychology lists Darwin, Lorenz, and Tinbergen among the discipline's pioneers even though all three were biologists.'' The evolutionary approach and its attention to species diversity are clearly gaining ground, whereas opposition to mentalistic interpretations of animal behavior is more and more a rear-guard movement.

  In the meantime, ethology, with its methodology of careful description and observation, has been absorbed into fields as diverse as child behavior and sociobiology. Even though early sociobiologists were quick to distance themselves from ethology as a way of showing that they were on to some new ideas (which was indeed the case), they were heavily inspired by it, especially by the Tinbergian school and its work on behavioral adaptation. Later, the term "sociobiology" fell into disrepute, leading to further name changes such as "behavioral ecology" and "evolutionary psychology," but without corresponding changes in outlook or research agenda. 12

  Whatever names we choose, students of animal behavior are still being trained largely in either biology or psychology, and the two have learned from each other, and have grown closer as a result. With increasing awareness of the flexibility of animal behavior, "instinct" is a term hardly used anymore, and the current interest in animal culture could be regarded as a triumph of those who have insisted all along on the importance of learning. In order to develop the study of behavior into a mature science we now need to find our inspiration in the Aristotelian view and organize our study along topic areas (such as cognition, evolutionary adaptation, culture, and genetics) rather than basing the structure of our discipline on whether we're dealing with a single bipedal primate or any other animal. Removal of this artificial split will go a long way toward calming the excessive fear of anthropomorphism, which fear was horn from it.

  "Science is not about being right in the end. Much more important is to conquer unimagined fields, to stimulate, dare new approaches, engender debate. And this, Konrad Lorenz has done like no one else in this branch of biology."

  Erik Zimen, 199953

  "Japanese culture does not emphasize the difference between people and animals and so is relatively free from the spell of antianthropomorphism ... we feel that this has led to many important discoveries."

  Jun'ichiro Itani, 1985

  of marching onward with perfect vision, science stumbles along behind leaders who occasionally take the wrong alley, after which it turns to other leaders who seem to know the way, then corrects itself again, until sufficient progress is made for the next generation to either thrust aside or build upon. In hindsight, the path taken may look straight, running from ignorance to profound insight, but only because our memory for dead ends is so much worse than that of a rat in a maze.

  Not surprisingly, leaders are treated with ambivalence. With the exception of those who have come up with absolutely invaluable insights, such as Einstein and Darwin, leaders first inspire and stimulate, then guide and protect their followers, but usually end up stifling further progress. They become major obstacles: the dinosaurs of fields that they themselves helped create. Hence the ugly patricides in which a number of upstarts revolt and get rid of the old guru.54 They never do so literally, of course, but instead wield the academic version of the long knife, such as disparaging jokes during lectures, critical footnotes, bad book reviews, and after all is said and done, deadly silence.

  Even though I will discuss two specific examples from the past-both related to animal behavior research in different cultural settings-the process should not be thought of as unique to any period. One patricide is going on as I write, perpetrated by a new generation of Darwinists who feel that the most popular evolutionary writer in the United States, Stephen Jay Gould, has been around long enough and holds old-fashioned, even erroneous views. Nasty lectures have been given, mean letters have been published, and in the ultimate insult, Gould-who as no other has stood up against creationism-has been labeled an "accidental creationist." The guru himself is putting up an impressive fight, countercharging that one of his opponents is the lapdog of another prominent evolutionist, facetiously apologizing to another for never having heard of him, and lumping all of his adversaries together as "fundamentalists." It isn't a pretty sight and reminds one of the love affair with the guillotine after the French Revolution. Now that the Darwinian approach is winning, at least in academia, evolutionary revolutionaries feel the need for a cleanup within their own ranks. And who better to drag to the scaffold than the evolutionist most widely recognized outside their little circle?ss

  Scientific leaders are often national figures, injecting entire fields with cultural themes and reflections that may not be understood by outsiders. For example, Gould's fight against creationism is largely of local, North American significance, as are his abundant references to baseball. Similarly, the two gurus to be discussed here were products of their respective cultures, which both happen to be defeated military powers. At the peak of his fame, Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (1903 -1989) was the world's most admired knower of animals, the Dr. Dolittle who t
old us how deep the similarities ran and warned against the then popular tabula rasa view of human nature. He had plenty of adversaries outside of biology-which never bothered him-but later on his ideas increasingly met with resistance from within. Combined with reports about his wartime past, this intramural antipathy made him vanish from the scene faster and more completely than any of his followers could have imagined.

  Kinji Imanishi (1902-1992) is much less well-known in the West, but he was a towering figure in postwar Japan, where he instilled great national pride as a thinker and scientist, and inspired a whole generation to pursue the sort of primate studies that are at the heart of this book. Inasmuch as a sharp dividing line between humans and animals is not part of Oriental philosophy, and anthropomorphism was never seen as a problem, there were fewer impediments in place than in the West to conceive culture as applicable to other animals. But Imanishi, too, went under the ax of history and is now out of favor with some, and forgotten by most others, even in his own country.

  By exploring the rise and fall of these figures we peek into the kitchen of science, and the cultural context within which it is conducted. The idea that science occurs in a vacuum never applies, not even to studies of animal behavior-or perhaps I should say, especially not to animal studies. We look at animals as informing us about ourselves, an orientation that sets the stage for the projection of values and the drawing of moral lessons. Scientists with the authority to do so play a different role, and enjoy a different status in society, than, say, prominent physicists or mathematicians. They are the high priests of nature who tell us where we came from and how we fit into the larger scheme of life.

  All the more reason to pay attention to how these leaders affect history, and how history judges them. The latter is not to be left to their immediate successors, who often have political axes to grind. Even if ninety percent of their ideas are attributable to the old guard, they will praise to heaven the ten percent that they came up with themselves, sharply criticizing their predecessors for not having thought of it. Subsequent generations have the task of rediscovering the earlier contributions, which in the case of Lorenz and Imanishi are indisputably immense.

  Coming to Terms with Konrad Lorenz

  "Telling the truth isn't enough. The whole truth needs to be told. Nothing kept secret. This is where the responsibility of the scientist is greatest. He must not let anything of what he suspects about the possible applications or threats fall in the shadows."

  Francois Jacob, 1998

  An older social psychologist once shocked me by reacting to my declaration that I was a European ethologist with "So, you must be a Nazi!" I'd never been called a Nazi before, nor have I since: it is not an insult often leveled at Dutchmen. After all, my country submitted to Hitler only after he had laid waste to Rotterdam, and the Dutch never accepted his view thatsince many of us are tall, blond, and blue-eyed-we belonged to the chosen race and should enthusiastically embrace the German cause in the same way as the Austrians had done two years before. Coming from a short, swarthy guy with a black moustache, the adoration of the Nordic phenotype had a certain comical quality. The Dutch, however, were not amused, and many resisted the occupation tooth and nail. One who failed to submit was Niko Tinbergen, the foremost Dutch ethologist, but the remark aimed at me referred not to him, but to Lorenz, the other founder of ethology.

  I was offended, and went to the library to look up the founding fathers of the fine discipline to which this unfriendly psychologist belonged. What I found were books such as Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B. F. Skinner, and the writings of John B. Watson. The denial of thoughts and feelings (instead of loving each other, people were said to exhibit "conditioned love responses"), combined with the goal of complete behavioral control, made for a perfectly Orwellian worldview. For example, Watson proposed to hot-wire all items that children are not supposed to touch around the house ("I should like to make the objects and situations of life build in their own negative reactions"),56 and Skinner raised his own daughter during the first years of life in his infamous Air-Crib. Skinner advocated training programs so as to produce ideal people who serve the greater good. He wanted to get rid of antisocial tendencies and dictate people's desires. All of us, he thought, should want what the social engineers have decided is best for our society.

  But, of course, this was not the right way to deal with the issue at hand: it meant only that scary, totalitarian ideology could be found elsewhere than in biology. The real challenge was to see what, if anything, was the matter with Lorenz. I had become used to oblique remarks in the literature about his past, usually a mixture of embarrassment and apology, as if we would all be better off if history were left alone. But what if this wasn't as easy as it seemed to people who no doubt had a vested interest in letting sleeping dogs lie?

  Like Konrad Lorenz, I am a jackdaw aficionado, having raised them by hand. Here a female, Rafia, is shown at the age of respectively 14, 26, and 37 days. (Drawing by the author)

  As a student I had avidly read Lorenz's first scientific paper, published in 1933, about jackdaws. A medium-sized member of the crow family, the jackdaw is my favorite bird. I raised and tamed them as a child, and kept several as a student-not in a cage, but freely flying in and out of my apartment window. I fed them as hungry fledglings every fifteen minutes for weeks until they were strong enough to take wing, which I "taught" them by throwing them high up in the air and letting them spiral down to my shoulder. They began to follow me on strolls through the neighborhood. I ended up developing a personal bond with each one of them, in some cases as their chosen mate. I also studied wild jackdaws in my first research project at the University of Groningen, climbing ancient steeples in which jackdaw colonies often nest.

  Compared to most birds, who sail or flap through the skies on their way from A to B, the jackdaw is a merry customer who seems to thoroughly enjoy the incredible gift of flight, which we can appreciate only vicariously. In Lorenz's romantic prose:

  In the chimney the autumn wind sings the song of the elements, and the old firs before my study window wave excitedly with their arms and sing so loudly in chorus that I can hear their singing melody through the double panes. Suddenly, from above, a dozen black, streamlined projectiles shoot across the piece of clouded sky for which my window forms a frame. Heavily as stones they fall, fall to the tops of the firs where they suddenly sprout wings, become birds and then light feather rags that the storm seizes and whirls out of my line of vision, more rapidly than they were borne into it....

  At first sight, you, poor human being, think that the storm is playing with the birds, like a cat with a mouse, but soon you see, with astonishment, that it is the fury of the elements that here plays the role of the mouse and that the jackdaws are treating the storm exactly as the cat its unfortunate victim.57

  Lorenz described the behavior of these smart, congenial birds in such detail, with so many unexpected insights, and so completely in line with my own experience, that he forever won my regard for his powers of observation. Here was a scientist I wanted to learn from! As I read his many other descriptions of animal behavior, it was as if a thousand pieces fell into place. I had watched animals all my life, sometimes the same animals as Lorenz, and his writings always enriched any knowledge and understanding.

  I learned that the secret of observation is to ask the right questions, and that observation needs to be followed by speculation about causes, functions, and connections between events. The goal is to sharpen the observations to the point that one is not just watching animals for pleasure and general information, but because one wants specific answers to specific questions.

  Lorenz's interest in natural behavior came at a time when American behaviorists were busy teaching laboratory animals all sorts of tricks in their so-called Skinner boxes. This work produced critical insights into learning processes, yet it ignored the readily observable fact that every animal is born with behavioral tendencies typical of its species. Many animals
survive through behavior that is only secondarily affected by learning, such as the dam building of the beaver or the weaving of the weaver bird. Because such "instincts" can be as fixed as anatomical traits, it is possible to compare them across species to trace their phylogeny in the same way as we do with the beaks of finches or the hands of primates.

  Lorenz did not work only on instincts, however. Indeed, one of the early triumphs of ethology was the discovery of a learning process known as imprinting. Hatchlings of certain birds, such as geese and chickens, do not automatically recognize their species. Normally, they learn to which species they belong by following their mother around, but in experiments they can be imprinted upon any moving object, such as a toy truck or a walking or swimming zoologist. Imprinting takes place spontaneously, without any of the usual rewards and punishments. The tendency to absorb specific information at a specific age became known as a learning predisposition: a preprogrammed seeking out of critical information.

  Lorenz also single-handedly inspired a massive amount of research on aggressive behavior. In his best-known work, On Aggression, which appeared in 1963, he argued convincingly that humans are naturally violent, thus starting a public debate continued by Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris, Edward Wilson, and many others. His claim provoked fierce opposition from anthropologists, psychologists, and social scientists, who went on to demonstrate the critical role of learning in human aggression. This was very important for our understanding, but it did of course nothing to counter Lorenz's argument: a role for nurture by no means excludes a role for nature. Not that Lorenz's views are now accepted. His idea that aggression is produced by an inner drive has been heavily criticized, because most of the time aggression seems to be triggered by outside circumstances. Lorenz also considered lethal violence against members of one's own species an abnormal human characteristic, whereas we now know that it is actually quite widespread in the animal kingdom. But even with these qualifications, Lorenz remains fundamentally right on the point that aggression is an innate human potential.